Cross-Language Validation and the Factor Structure of the Social-Emotional Competence Questionnaire for Pakistani Adolescents

Background For the last few years, in the field of school education, social-emotional competencies have been gaining in importance because they result in positive attitudes and adaptation to school (Mella et al., 2021). Objective The current study was designed to conduct Urdu translation, cross-language validation, and confirmatory factor analysis of the Social-Emotional Competence Questionnaire (SECQ) for Pakistani adolescents. Design Urdu translation was done using the standard back-translation method. The data for the main study was collected using a non-random sampling method for 910 adolescents who were between 10 to 19 years old. Results The findings of the pilot study (n = 64) show that the Social-Emotional Competence Questionnaire is a reliable questionnaire, as Cronbach’s alpha reliabilities of both versions (English and Urdu) were acceptable (Version 1 α = 0.77; Version 2 α = 0.77). After 15 days, the Pearson product-moment correlation was checked to meet the objective of cross-language validation, which resulted in a high correlation between the two forms (r = 0.88). The original author of the questionnaire had proposed a factor structure consisting of five factors, namely: self-awareness, social awareness, self-management, relationship management, and responsible decision-making. Results of the confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) in the present study also confirmed and supported the five-factor structure in comparison to other models for the Urdu version. Conclusion The Social-Emotional Competence Questionnaire is a reliable and culturally-validated tool for adolescents attending school, which can be used in future research for measuring social-emotional competencies.


Introduction
Social-emotional competencies are important for people of all ages, including young children, adolescents, and older adults.ese skills particularly help children in managing problematic behaviors, thereby increasing interest and commitment toward their school.ese are the basic advantages of these competencies.ey also indirectly help to increase cooperation and problem-solving abilities among individuals, which improves family relationships and increases a healthy commitment towards society (Gokel & Dagli, 2017).
Since 1900, social-emotional competencies have been studied widely around the world, and intervention programs have been aimed at increasing these skills at various levels of education (Cristovao et al., 2020;Osher et al., 2016).ese interventions are e ective in improving skills of social-emotional learning, social behavior, and academic performance, as well as in decreasing problematic behaviors and psychological distress (Durlak et al., 2011).ese skills are greatly in uenced by culture, gender, and peer relationships.Males are less interested in, and less able to control, their emotions.So, males appear insensitive, non-cooperative, less emotional, and more aggressive (Chaplin & Aldao, 2013;Curby, et al, 2015).But females are more expressive than males, and can control their feelings in a constructive way, which enables them to better understand a variety of emotions, and their causes and consequences (Garner, et al, 2014).
As interest in the social-emotional domain has increased globally in the context of educational settings, this has increased the need to promote feelings of interpersonal skills of being accepted and recognized (Zhang et al., 2014).e social behavior of adolescents plays a vital role for students (Gómez-Ortiz et al., 2017), which favors school success (Cappadocia & Weiss, 2011).
It is widely-accepted that social competence is a comprehensive, empirical, and multi-faceted phenomena, which cannot be understood on its own, as it can include emotional regulation, prosocial behavior, the ability to adapt normatively, social adjustment, and perceived e ectiveness in social interactions (Dirks et al., 2007;Losada, 2018;Santos et al., 2014).Gómez-Ortiz et al. (2017) state that social competence is the e cacy of social interaction, which stems from usage of socio-emotional skills in order to attain personal aims across diverse circumstances, and at di erent time periods.In this manner, social competence includes the cognitive and social-emotional capabilities of each individual to succeed under di erent circumstances, in forming healthy relationships among di erent people (Del Prette & Del Prette, 2005).
Hence, social competence means adjustment to changing demands in the school environment, in interpersonal relationships, emotional health, and acceptance among classmates (Losada et al., 2018).In addition, especially for adolescents, it is appropriate to study and evaluate interventions, to see their e ect on social competence in educational settings (Gómez-Ortiz et al., 2017;Losada et al., 2017), because it is an important developmental period of maturation, and of subtle adaptation (as distinctive changes occur in this phase) in individuals (Bessa et al., 2019;Gómez-Ortiz et al., 2017).
e perception of what is appropriate social-emotional behavior changes from one context to another among di erent cultural groups (Kwong et al., 2018;Broekhuizen et al., 2017), and it is known as a unique aspect of childhood development.Country-level norms and values guide the appropriateness of social behavior and emotional expressivity (Wang & Zhang, 2020).When Asian people are com-municating and interacting in public, they show limited expression of emotions and feelings.But group cohesiveness and feeling of belongingness are the most prominent features of some parts of Asian culture, i.e., East Asian culture (Liew & Zhou, 2022).If a focus is placed on research about social-emotional development, then evidence mostly pops up from regions such as Northern America, Europe, Great Britain, and Australia (Ren, et al., 2020;Ren & Pope Edwards, 2016).
For the past few years, those associated with the lives of children and adolescents, such as parents, teachers, researchers, and policy makers, have acknowledged the importance of social-emotional development for children and adolescents; this then has pushed people from Asia to study the cultural di erences in social-emotional development (Chung et al., 2020).Even the most recent systematic review by Yong et al. (2023), found that most studies have come from the Asian continent -particularly from countries such as China and Hong Kong.Samples of these studies share Chinese ethnicity, which restricts their generalizability.ere is a scarcity of socialemotional development studies from Southeast, North, West, and Central Asia.Previous literature on social-emotional development indicated a clear need for scales to measure these competencies that are psychometrically rigorous and which have practical use in schools (Mantz et al., 2016).

Objectives of the study
In the following paper, an e ort was made to examine cross-language translation (to Urdu), and to carry out a con rmatory factor analysis of the Social-Emotional Competence Questionnaire, so that it can be used for evaluating the competencies among students, in light of the need for a reliable and valid questionnaire regarding social competencies in Pakistan.

Method
rough non-random sampling, adolescents who were currently enrolled in school were selected to take part in the study.
e main phase of the study included 910 adolescents attending public schools, of classes 6 to 10.Of these, 454 were males, and 456 were females, with an age range 10 to 19 years (M = 13.45,SD = 1.63).If the students reported physical or psychological issues, or a history of traumatic events or surgery in the past six months, they were excluded from the study.In order to calculate a sample in any study for analyzing CFA, it is suggested to minimally include ve to 10 individuals per item for that scale (Choudhry et al. 2018;Shuja et al., 2020).
Parts of the study e current study can be divided in two phases: the rst phase in which the pilot study was based on Urdu translation and cross validation, and the second phase in which item-total correlation and various factor structures were computed as part of the main study.

Process of Urdu Translation of the SECQ
For Urdu translation, the forward-backward method was used in the study (Anderson & Brislin, 1976;Hambleton, 1994), e details of each step of the translation process are given below.a) In Step 1, the English SECQ was given to five professionals to translate it into Urdu as accurately as possible, by keeping the construct of each item in mind.These professionals had a minimum of a Masters degree in different domains of the social sciences.They were experts in both the English and Urdu languages (Hambleton & Patsula, 1999).At the end of this phase, five independent Urdu translations were received by the researcher.b) In Step 2, the five translations were assembled up in a word.docxdocument.
In order to check the Urdu translations, five different professionals were selected; their main task was to check the grammar, content, and construction of words and sentences.They were requested to propose new words or sentences if they found the content to be mistranslated, incorrect, or unclear, in order to obtain translations as close as possible to the meaning of the original version.c) In Step 3, five more professionals were hired who did not know about the questionnaire, to do five back-translations.d) In Step 4, the same five bilingual professionals as in Step 2, reviewed and evaluated the back translations, in order to obtain accurate and precise items for the final Urdu SECQ version.e) In Step 5, the final Urdu and English SECQ versions were administered to male and female students in two groups at two time periods.These students were bilinguals and they could understand both languages.After an interval of fifteen days, the same procedure was repeated with the same participants, in order to achieve cross-language validity for evaluating the structure and empirical equivalence for the Urdu and English SECQ.

Procedure
is study was approved by the Ethical Committee of Fatima Jinnah Women University, Rawalpindi.A er that approval, the SECQ author's approval to use a questionnaire in the study was obtained.A er the SECQ author's approval, approval for data collection was obtained from the directorate of Federal Government Education Institutions.In the end, principals, school teachers, and students were informed about the study, its aim, signi cance, the right to withdraw at any time, and the matter of con dentiality.In total, the students spent 10 to 15 minutes completing the questionnaire, during which their questions were also addressed.

Study Instrument
Individual descriptors for the students included age, gender, and their school class.
e social competence of adolescents was assessed by the Social-Emotional Competence Questionnaire (SECQ).
e Social-Emotional Competence Questionnaire (SECQ) e Social-Emotional Competence Questionnaire (SECQ) was developed by Zhou and Ee in 2012.e SECQ is comprised of ve subscales based on 25 items; these subscales are self-awareness, social awareness, self-management, relationship management, and responsible decision-making.e Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) grouped these competencies into intrapersonal (self-awareness, self-management), and interpersonal competencies (social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making) (Taylor et al., 2018).ese social competencies are the means of adjustment to the changing demands of the school environment, interpersonal relationships, emotional health, and acceptance among classmates (Losada et al., 2018).
Questions of SECQ are scored on a six-point Likert scale which ranges from response options such as "not at all true of me" to "very true of me." Overall, the authors reported reliability of 0.86 for the SECQ (Zhou & Ee, 2012).Resurrección et al. (2021) chose 221 primary education students, ages from 8 to 11 years, and for them they reported Cronbach's alpha for each subscale: self-awareness = 0.64; social awareness = 0.72; self-management = 0.73; relationship management = 0.69; and responsible decision-making = 0.76.In the same way, Aguilar et al. ( 2019) selected 1494 participants from twelve schools with ages between 7 and 16 years old, and they reported reliability for the subscales of the SECQ as: self-awareness α = 0.72, social awareness α = 0.76, self-management α = 0.80, relationship management α = 0.72, and responsible decision-making α = 0.82.Sample items of the questionnaire are: 1) I understand my moods and feelings; 2) If a friend is upset, I have a pretty good idea why; and. 3) I always try and comfort my friends when they are sad.

Results
Data was analyzed using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS version 23, IBM Corp., Armonk, NY, USA), and the Analysis of Moment Structure (AMOS 22).In the rst step, the mean, standard deviation, and alpha reliabilities of the English and Urdu versions, and the Pearson correlation, were calculated.In step 2, item-total correlation and di erent factor structures of the questionnaire were tested.Table 1 shows that alpha reliability coe cients were 0.77 for both forms, with correlation r = 0.88. is indicates that the Urdu SECQ had a good internal consis-tency and test-retest reliability, over the interval of 15 days in a small sample of 64 students.
Table 2 shows the corrected item-total correlation of the main study of the Social-Emotional Competence Questionnaire.Most of the items had an above .20value for the corrected item-total correlation, which was acceptable (Abubakar et al., 2020;Piedmont, 2014).Table 3 represents the variety of Model Fit Indices for the Urdu version of the Social-Emotional Competence Questionnaire.ese models are: ve factors, unidimensional, two global factors, ve factors plus two, and one higher order factor.(Brown, 2015;Hooper et al., 2008).

Discussion
e current study was conducted to determine the reliability, cross-language validity, and con rmatory factor analysis of the Social-Emotional Competence Questionnaire.It is one of the studies that aims to study the acceptability of t and the inherent structure of the scale for the Pakistani population.Cross-language validation was done in a pilot study by administering both Urdu and English versions, with a 15-day interval in between, to 64 adolescent students.e results revealed that the Urdu and English versions of the questionnaire had a good level of reliability (Version 1 and Version 2 α = 0.77).
e ndings of the present study regarding the reliability of the scale, are in line with most recently-conducted studies such as the ones by Kim (2021) and Portela-Pino et al. (2021), which have reported an average reliability of the SECQ as 0.88 and 0.91.Aguilar et al. (2019) and Resurrección et al. (2021) found a reliability of: selfawareness = 0.72, 0.64; social awareness = 0.76, 0.72; self-management = 0.80, 0.73; relationship management = 0.72, 0.69; and responsible decision-making = 0.82, 0.76, respectively.
A er Cronbach's alpha reliability met the criteria of satisfaction, then item-total correlation was computed, and the correlation value ranged from .30 to .67. ese two values are same as previous studies (Abubakar et al., 2020;Piedmont, 2014).Apart from item-total correlation, factor loading of all items was checked, and all of these were higher than 0.30.All 25 items of the SECQ had a factor loading of a minimum of 0.30 and a maximum of 0.67, which had been recommended in a previous study (Jiménez, et al., 2018).
e present study also computed a factor structure based on ve factors, uni-dimensional, two global factors, ve factors + two higher order factors, and ve factors + one higher order factor, of the Social-Emotional Competence Questionnaire.For testing acceptability of the proposed models, values of chi-square, degree of freedom, NFI, IFI, TLI, CFI, and RMSEA were checked.All proposed models of SECQ showed that the best-t models for the scale such as chi-square and degree of freedom for ve factor SECQ was 1016.334 (263), and the values of other indexes were: NFI = .904,IFI = .927,TLI = .917,CFI = .927,and RMSEA = .056.
Nearly all these ve models of the SECQ supported the data e ciently.Among all these models, the ve-factor model was the best-suited model for the SECQ, and this nding of CFA was the same as for the original study of the SECQ.In that study, authors initially indicated a marginal acceptable t: χ 2 = 539.98(df = 265, p<.001), χ 2 /df = 2.04; RMSEA = .048;CFI = .89;and IFI = .89;but later on, for a sample of secondary school children, the CFA values of model t were suitable: χ 2 = 712.20 (df = 265, p<.001), χ2/df = 2.69; RMSEA = .069;CFI = .86;and IFI = .86(Zhou & Ee, 2012).
e ndings of present study are the same as the aforementioned study, except for the two global factor SECQ models, which were not supported by Vietnamese culture. is also supports the notion that the culture of each country is unique, and can cause changes in the expression of social competence among its people (Kwong et al., 2018;Broekhuizen et al., 2017).e results of the present research are in line with the prede ned objectives that are supported by previous research.In the recent years, the SECQ has been translated and culturally-validated for residents of Hungary and Vietnam.
e ndings of the present study further provided evidence of cross-language validity from Pakistan by testing a variety of SECQ models.Practitioners who are working with adolescents might use the validated SECQ instrument in both clinical and non-clinical settings.e SECQ is a short, straightforward, and easily comprehensible questionnaire, which provides an opportunity to administer it more than one time to evaluate the level of social competence of adolescents.Future studies can also use other measures with the SECQ in order to establish convergent and discriminant validity among di erent scales.By applying the standards of evidence-based practice, the psychometric qualities of the SECQ can be explored in other Asian countries.

Conclusion
Among models of the SECQ such as the ve-factor model, uni-dimensional, two global factor, ve factors plus two and one higher order factors, the ve-factor model emerged as a promising factor, and the SECQ was culturally-validated scale for determining social competence on the sample of adolescent students in Pakistan.Hence, future researchers should use the mean of the ve-dimensions model for social competence.

Figure 2 .
Figure 2. CFA model for uni-dimensional Social-Emotional Competence Questionnaire

Figure 4 .
Figure 4. CFA model for ve factors + two higher-order factors of Social-Emotional Competence Questionnaire

Table 1
Pearson product-moment correlation coe cient, test-retest reliability of Urdu and English versions of the Social-Emotional Competence Questionnaire (SECQ) n = 64)

Table 3
Model-t Indexes for the Urdu Version of the Social-Emotional Competence Questionnaire (SECQ) (N=910) 2 = chi-square; df = degree of freedom; RMSEA = root mean square error of approximation; IFI = incremental t index; NFI = normed t index; CFI=comparative t index; TLI =Tucker-Lewis index.